Anne Sutter

Personal Information

Ph.D., University of OregonSpecialty: Experimental Psychology

Research Interests:In my research, I use what is known about the basics of visual processing to figure out how the brain might go about perceiving objects in the world. I am particularly interested in the way texture information is used by the visual system. Texture is an important feature of objects; without it, representations of objects do not look real. I have worked to determine the processes by which adjacent areas of different texture are perceived to be distinct regions (different objects) in a visual scene. Most of this research has been conducted with the goal of explaining "texture segregation" at the earliest possible level of the visual system. Questions that I plan to address in future experiments include: What constitutes a "texture" in perception? What role does attention play in whether a stimulus is perceived as a texture or a collection of objects? To what extent does the experimental task determine the perception of the stimulus in studies of texture segregation and visual search?